


the eye closes

by escherzo



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Character Death, Eye Trauma, M/M, One (1) happy ending, Self-Sacrifice, extinction!martin, minor appearances by Jonah Magnus, speculative endings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:53:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27659786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escherzo/pseuds/escherzo
Summary: Five ways the road might end (and one way it won't).
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 13
Kudos: 75





	the eye closes

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you gotta get all of your thoughts and theories in one place before the actual end comes around and they are all violently jossed (I do not anticipate Jonny's planned ending is one of these but... maybe?). wildly speculative. unbetaed. 
> 
> (if you want to just skip to the forbidden happy ending search for the +1)

**1\. The House on Hilltop Road**  
“Beneath Hilltop Road, there is a wound. A scar in reality deep underneath the earth from which the Fears emerged when the world changed. It's... a door, in some ways.”

Jon leads Martin up the steps, their hands entwined, and the stairs creak under their combined weight. The windows are cobwebbed and old, with strange, spiraling patterns of web through the dust on the panes, and the way the front door creaks open into the darkness of the empty house makes Martin shudder. 

“If it's a door...” Martin says, and he hesitates. 

“Then it can be closed. There is another universe on the other side, too, another set of possibilities; we had a statement from a woman who emerged from it. The Magnus Institute doesn't exist in her world. The Fears didn't either, although they have begun to creep through the scar into it now. If we close the door now, we can—we could seal that universe off from them forever. Keep all of those people safe.”

“And this world?”

Jon sighs and closes his eyes. “This world would still be lost. But I—I can send all of the people from this world through to the other one, I think. Give them a chance in a new world. They wouldn't remember that any of this had happened; they would wake up to find they were in a world that was different than they remembered, but they'd adapt. Figure it out. It would be a better life than this one.”

“Are you sure?”

Jon nods. 

“Then let's _do_ it. What are we waiting for?” Martin's eyes shine with excitement and possibility, and Jon tries to ignore the way it makes his heart hurt.

“The door can only be closed on this side,” Jon explains gently, leading Martin towards the basement door. The scar in reality calls to him, soft whispers of another world with fresh fear, ripe for the taking. “I can't go with them. With you.”

Martin turns to cup Jon's face with both hands and leans in to kiss him, soft and slow. There are tears in the corners of his eyes when he pulls back, but his jaw is set. “I'm not leaving you here alone. You _know_ that. If you can't go with them, I'm, I'm not going either.” 

Jon presses their foreheads together, eyes closed. “Martin...”

“I'm not going.”

“... Alright. Alright.” Jon takes Martin's hands in his. “It's... not going to be good. Cut off from their food sources, the Fears will slowly starve here. Them and the creatures of fear too separated from their sense of self to be able to pass through to the new world. The domains will still exist, though they will fade over time. And after a while, there will be nothing. The End will win.” 

“If we couldn't put the world back, that would happen anyway.”

“Yes. I just, I just want to make sure that you're sure. That you understand that however hard it's been for you since the Change, it's going to stay just as bad, and there won't be any way out of it for us. Not after.”

“Of course I'm sure,” Martin says. “It's _you._ I'm not leaving.” 

Jon leans in to kiss him again, soft and sweet, and when he pulls away he is smiling. “Then we have a ritual to start. After me.”

They descend the stairs to the basement of Hilltop Road hand in hand.

**2\. “You are an archive of fear...”**  
“I understand now,” Jon says. “I understand what I have to do.” 

Jonah Magnus's crumpled body lies before him, and the throne of the Panopticon sits empty. There are eyes on every wall and they are all trained on him, and outside, the wind howls over a ruined world. Nothing has been put back. Magnus's death has changed nothing. 

“... Jon?” Martin asks, uncertain, and Jon takes another step towards the throne. 

“Do you trust me?” Jon asks.

“What are you going to do? I thought—I thought it would _fix_ this,” Martin says helplessly, gesturing to the body at their feet. At its vacant, staring eyes that still see right through him. 

“I knew it wouldn't,” Jon admits. “But now I know what will. He told me once, in the ritual to make the world new, _you are an archive of fear._ I just have to—I just have to let them in. All of them. I can trap them inside of me.” He laughs without humor. “File them away.” 

“And what happens to _you_?”

“I don't know,” Jon says, and his smile is weak. “I... don't think I'll wake up again. But I can put this right.”

“You know I'm not going to let you do that.”

Jon draws Martin into his arms, his bloody hands at the small of Martin's back, his small body tucked all along Martin's front. “You have to.” 

“I, I can help you,” Martin says, trying to speak around the lump rising in his throat. He holds Jon tight to himself. “We had to go through all of the domains. _Experience_ them. I'm marked now too. You know that.” 

There is room for both of them on the great throne, but only just. Martin wraps an arm around Jon's middle and keeps him close, and Jon rests his head on Martin's shoulder, and for a moment all Martin can think of is the way Jon slept against him on the train to Scotland, so many months ago. The peaceful lines of his face. The hope that went through him that maybe, up there, hidden away from the world, they could be _free._

“Are you ready?” Jon asks, and every eye in the room is watching them. 

“I'm ready.”

Jon nods. “Now, repeat after me. You who watch and know and understand none...” 

*

Somewhere in the center of London, beneath an art museum, there are the ruined remains of an old tower, with tunnels beneath that snaking down into the earth, and at what used to be the summit of that tower there is a room that is always in darkness, empty save for a great stone throne that is split perfectly in two. 

On the ground before it, there are two bodies, two people whose names have been lost to history, and they are curled around each other. They hold each other tight. Their hearts do not beat, and their lungs do not move, and they are lost in a nightmare they will never wake from. 

But in the nightmare, as in life, they are together.

**3\. Les héritiers**  
“Please, Jon,” Martin says softly, Jon's limp, still body cradled in his arms. “Please. Please wake up.” 

Jon does not respond; Martin can't look away from the empty sockets where his eyes should be, at the scorched marks where they had been burned out of him. He feels like he weighs nothing at all, and Martin pulls him fully into his lap and presses their foreheads together, praying for a response that will not come. 

Jonah Magnus is dead. Jon is dead. Martin is alone in the Panopticon, holding onto Jon's body because he has nothing else left, and the whole world's eyes are upon him. There is no way out. No way of _fixing this_. 

“Can the world still be put right? You were supposed to _tell me_ ,” Martin says, shaking Jon's body slightly. “You were supposed to know how this worked. Now it's just me. What am I supposed to do? I don't have any—I don't have anything.”

He doesn't need Jon to know what the answer is, though. There is no fixing this. He knows it in the same way that he knows Jon is dead, and when he closes his eyes and screams until his voice cracks and fades away, he does not care that the whole world can hear it. 

The world will continue to go on because there is still fear to be fed from. All he can do now is—help end the pain of the people already here. They would fade away on their own, in the end, but before that would be only incalculable suffering. But if what remains on the Earth is something that couldn't feel fear then it would all end. The people, wherever they went when the End finally claimed them, would get to be free, at least. 

“I read a statement, once,” Martin tells Jon softly, rocking him back and forth. “It was from a woman named Bernadette Delcour. It was about the world _after_. There was a man called—Hillier, I think, and he had a theory about the end of the world, and about the life that would be here after people were. What would replace us. I don't think...” He hesitates. “I don't think he found an alternate world. I think he stepped through into this one. This one after.”

He knows the Extinction better than anyone. He nearly sacrificed his life to stop it, and when he sets Jon down softly onto the ground and stands, he can feel the threads of it between his fingers. All he has to do is let it in. 

“I can't put it back,” he says to Jon, and closes his eyes. “But I can end it.” 

He raises his arms and lets the power flow through him and out of him, a beacon atop the tower that looks down upon the world, and like a wave, the life before him crumbles to dust. 

And from its ashes, something new begins to rise. 

**4\. going back to the war**  
“The Eye cannot see inside itself, Jon, you _know_ this,” Jonah Magnus says, gritting his teeth through the pain as blood begins to flow from his eyes. "This will kill you too."

“I don't _care_ ,” Jon growls, and his own eyes begin to bead with bloody tears as he raises his hand and calls upon the power that controls them both. “ _Ceaseless Watcher, look upon your wretched servant, this craven man that serves the Eye only to prolong his own life--_ ” 

The being that had been Jonah Magnus flickers and drains away to nothing as Jon speaks, and the power courses through Jon—too much, he can't _hold_ it all, and the sound of rushing static in his ears is the only thing he can hear before the whole world goes black.

*

“Jon! Wake up. Wake up. Wait, Jon, Jon, _Jon, WAKE UP!_ ” 

Jon awakes to the howling, rushing sound of a thousand voices screaming in terror and Martin kneeling at his side, slapping his face. The cold, rough wood of the floor of the safehouse presses into his bare skin, and the windows are shattered out, the curtains blowing in the gales of a storm that should not be. 

“Uh– Wh– _Martin?_ ”

It is the ninety second time he has awakened. The world is Jon's domain, and he is trapped in it, as surely as any of the victims screaming out their own personal terror in a place they cannot escape.

Maybe this time, he'll get it right.

**5\. “If _you_ had died—would the others have been able to quit?”**  
“Who are you?” Jon demands, trying to force his voice not to shake. The man in the shadows is older, weathered and weary and with scars pockmarked all across his face, and his hair has gone fully grey, but it is still, somehow, impossibly his own face. 

The other man, the other Jon, smiles at him, soft and sad. “I'm so sorry,” he says. “I wish I could—explain it. But I can't stay here for long. I'm... I'm using most of my power to be here at all. But this is for the best.”

“ _What_ is?” Jon asks, his voice rising, and from further into the flat, he hears Georgie calling, “Jon, are you alright? What's that noise?”

“I'm sorry,” the older Jon says again, and the knife goes across Jon's throat so fast he does not feel it at all. 

His own eyes are the last thing he sees. 

**+1. “If we were all happy that wouldn’t actually _be_ the end of the world.” **  
“Jon, you're going to be _late_ ,” Martin says, shaking him, and Jon groans and burrows his face into the pillow further. The morning sun streams in on both of them, warming him, and underneath his arm, their cat, an old beast of a ginger named the Chancellor, gives a protesting mrrp at being jostled. “Jon, c'mon. You told me you wanted me to wake you up at six, and that you'd hate it, and that I _shouldn't let you go back to sleep._ Do you remember?”

Jon groans again. “I remember,” he says sadly into his pillow.

“School starts in two hours,” Martin says, pulling back the covers from Jon all at once and then sitting on them so he can't retrieve them. “First day. You've got this.” He leans in and kisses Jon, soft and sweet, and Jon tangles his fingers in Martin's hair to keep him close. Martin's hair is a wild, riotous mess of curls this morning, made worse by Jon's twisting fingers, but he's flushed and smiling when Jon pulls away, his cheeks and the tips of his nose pink.

“You can't distract me,” Martin says brightly, leaning down for one more quick peck. “I've got tea and breakfast in the kitchen. C'mon. Up up.”

“Yes, yes,” Jon says, waving a hand at him and finally pushes himself up to sitting. Martin had been so _happy_ when he'd admitted he was going to try to get his teaching license. Something to distract him from thinking about the nightmares that still didn't quite fade, or the way that sometimes he would be walking down the street, one hand tucked into Martin's, and he would recognize someone on the street and know it was because he'd seen their suffering in the world-that-was. 

The safehouse was lost, crumbling into old stone and rotten wood when the world changed back, but Scotland had tucked itself into their heart, and so they'd they'd stayed, after. They had a new flat, a bit run-down but homey, and Martin wrote poetry and they'd adopted a cat that curled in by their side at night and made protesting noises when they tried to stop giving him cuddles. It all felt so painfully, wonderfully _normal_. 

“Good morning,” Martin says cheerily as Jon trudges his way into the kitchen, holding out a mug towards him. “Feeling ready for it?”

“No,” Jon admits. “But I don't think anybody ever does.” 

“You're going to do great,” Martin says, and leans in to kiss him. “And I'll be here, keeping the Chancellor company until you get home. Oh! I think one of the neighbors—Aileen, maybe? The tiny lady down the hall who always wants to hear about the cat. She wanted to invite us over for dinner, do you want to go?”

“I'll see how I'm feeling,” Jon says, taking a sip of his tea. He is still struck, after all this time, by how much he missed it in the world-that-was. “But I'll try. I promise.”

“Alright,” Martin says, beaming at him. “That's good then.” 

The sun coming in from the big kitchen window lights up the contours of Martin's face and makes him glow, his ginger hair shining golden, and Jon reaches out to take one of Martin's hands in his and hold it across the table. 

“Love you,” he says, and Martin ducks his head and smiles and repeats it back. The prospect of his first day is terrifying, but he's been through worse. He's been through so much worse, and he wouldn't have gotten through it alone. This is no different.

He's going to be okay. They both are.


End file.
